Sam I Am
by nomuse
Summary: Yamatai always bugged me. I loved the character arc of Lara but the gameplay was so AAA, mowing down hundreds of cultists with submachine guns. So call this my first attempt to bring the story back to prominence...oh, but maybe a fresh perspective will help as well...
1. On a Boat, Ship, Whatever

A famous explorer once said adventures were just bad planning. Or that adventures were what other people had. Or was that Bilbo Baggins? _Dammit, girl!_ I chided myself, _you've got to start documenting your citations!_

 _Focus._ I was deep into editing the material from Camera Two. Whitman was going to hate it. Sucked to be him. He'd flubbed the fish thing totally, so no point in editing it up as the kind of fluffy filler we'd intended to shoot. But cut it from the hand-held to give it that _cinema verité_ flavor, put the focus on him dropping the fish and his little tantrum and cut in some bits of the guys goofing off - yeah, that would fly.

Whitman was the star of the show, but he didn't realize what kind of star he was turning out to be. His sympathy for out-of-the-mainstream archaeological theories had attracted my family's attention. And, yes, they were serious in seeing if it was possible to learn something about the fabled Yamatai and my famous maybe-ancestor Queen Himiko.

But the Nishimura's were also businessmen, and they knew out-of-the-mainstream sold. The public didn't care about good science. They weren't going to tune in to watch someone dig test pits or sort potsherds. But put a rugged man in khaki on a beaten-up tramp steamer looking for a lost island full of magic and lost treasure, and, yeah. Whitman's flair for publicity and his short temper only made him better copy. There was even rumors of a messy divorce proceeding in the wings.

If the public couldn't have a hero, they'd have a poseur and gleefully watch as he self-destructed. He had the whole package. Lecturing down at everyone like he was Neil deGrasse Tyson or something. Vest with pockets and sports watch on a manly band - one of those ones that gives the phases of Mars and humidity and water temperature in Waikiki - but watch him move, and you'd quickly realize a flight of stairs would leave him winded. Some outdoors-man!

He was in short a total prick and I wasn't sure how much longer I'd be able to put up with him.

 _There._ I paused and marked the frame, just as Jonah Maiava paused in his turn, holding the gutting knife in one hand and the fish in another like some sort of religious offering to a temperamental god. You could practically hear the laugh track. Hey, it wasn't National Film Board material, but you worked with what you could get...

"What the FUCK!?"

There was a giant noise, all the lights flickered, and the damned wall went out of its way to come over to my bunk and hit me in the face.

"Ow!" I said. "What the hell?!" The door had popped open and now everything was wet. Water was ankle-deep on my floor and more was coming in and the Attack Wall was dancing in for a second go at me. I grabbed the camera and cradled it against my chest to protect it as I staggered to my feet and tried to walk uphill to the door.

More water. My room - sorry, "cabin" - was too wet to stay in. I staggered outside. All dark except for flashing lights from somewhere. That was a big help. I looked left. Err, port. Err, aft. Whatever! I squinted doubtfully. It was all dark down that way and didn't seem friendly. I looked the other way.

"Oh, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!"

White water filled the passageway and was roaring down on me like the bulls in Pamplona.

It hit. I was rolling over, smashing into things in the dark and water, trying to breath. I was blacking out. In our darkest hour...we ask if someone could find a damn light bulb! Yeah, that's how I was going to die. Trying to remember a quote I'd heard somewhere. Write the shit down, Sam! I told myself.

And all of a sudden, sodden, I was on the deck. The ship looked like a mess. The sea was in the wrong place, and wouldn't stay still. Clouds hurtled overhead, lit by lighting. It looked like that IMAX documentary _Stormchasers_ out there. I didn't want to be in the eye of a hurricane!

Suddenly there was Angus, doing something to one of the lifeboats. Battening the davits or whatever you did to launch the things. "Y'r gill be nae to whence a'ga comin'!" he said. Yeah, don't look at me. I can't understand a word he says. I think you have to be born Glaswegian.

"Hey!" I said. Angus had shoved me into the lifeboat. Hard. I fell face-first. This was a bad day for faces. The _Endurance_ 's captain turned, gesturing towards someone, or something...and another wall of water came out of the sky and whipped him out of sight. His arm must have hit the release as he went, because my boat was in motion. The _Endurance_ jumped away from me. Then swung back for another try, the steel wall of the hull looming over my head about to flatten me. Hung that way for eons. Then slid away again.

And then I could see and hear nothing but water and storm. Rain was tearing out of the clouds in such great sheets it was impossible to tell sea from sky, and my little boat was wallowing about so much you didn't know which way was up to begin with.

There was a tarp covering most of the boat. I crawled under that, found grabbing-on things to grab on to, and huddled like a wet kitten, waiting out the storm. Wasn't like I had any small-boat handling skills. Even assuming — as against the groaning and clattering sounds it was making — it wasn't about to be dashed to pieces in the next second. I was exhausted. I was wet. My head hurt. And the noise! No-one who hasn't been in heavy seas can understand just how overwhelming the noise is. Okay; maybe one of those guys from the Somme in _The Great War_ , getting shelled by artillery until they could hardly think.

Long story short…I was battered senseless and left to be carried where the winds and waves willed.


	2. Interview With a Scavenger

I woke.

Well, yeah. Otherwise this would be a much shorter story. I'd slept in my clothes. My _wet_ clothes. My socks were still damp inside my boots. My feet must smell like a Paris Metro station by now. My boots! Salt water soaking and good leather did not belong together, and let me tell you these were _not_ JC Penney's. Godammit.

I was sore and my head hurt and I was inside and the light was dim and had a color temperature of 1,850K. Candles and torches, then. It was a cave and smelled like the sea and it was filled with junk and a man got up from where he was crouched in front of a whole lot of candles and came loping over to me.

"Um, hello," I said. He was bearded and scrawny, ropey muscles and old scars, and dressed like a castaway in a _New Yorker_ cartoon. He smelled a lot better than expected — probably all the water he'd been splashing about in to pull out the assortment of floats and barrels and driftwood and whatever that covered the cave.

"Um, hello," he parroted, voice rusty. His mouth worked and his eyes stared, obviously trying to get wrapped around the concept of spoken language again.

"Thank you for rescuing me," I said politely. "Where the hell am I?" Okay, that hadn't sounded as polite as I had meant it.

He made a sort of soft gobbling noise. Speech wasn't his friend yet. "…Danger…" he finally got out.

"Yeah, danger," I said. "Sinking boats, giant storms, been there, got the wet socks to prove it. I don't suppose you have a phone down here, do you?" I was lying on a battered army cot that looked like it had been in the Second World War. The canvas was rotting off it and what was left was stiff as poster-board. I swung my legs over gingerly then waited for the cave to stop swirling. This was worse than being hung over, if only because the night before had been a lot less fun.

The man seemed alarmed. He was making pacifying gestures as if he thought this whole up-and-around thing was a poor idea on my part. I couldn't help but agree, but the sooner I saw daylight, the sooner I could get back to civilization. What kind of remote beachcomber's paradise had I washed up on, anyhow?

"Is this Japan?" I asked.

My voice must have been louder that time. The man got really nervous and started making shushing noises in addition to his, "Go back to bed" gestures. This was getting creepier by the second.

"Japan? Phone? What's the nearest town?" I asked firmly, not keeping my voice down.

"No, no, they will _hear_ you!" the man said, his eyes bugging out.

"Who? The others? Who else got off the ship?" I raised my voice. "Angus? Reyes? Jonah?"

The man made a whimpering cry and leapt at me. Covered my mouth and shoved me back. The back of my knees hit the cot and I sat down hard. "The others will hear you!" he screamed in a whisper.

Okay, _now_ he was scaring me. A lot. This little cave was starting to feel pretty damn claustrophobic. It was the candles. Lots and lots of candles up on little shelves all over one end of the room. A set-dresser's dream. Yeah, that was it all right. Every time a movie wanted to up the creep-out factor, it would be lots and lots of candles.

I fought down my instincts and didn't struggle. Didn't fight against his hand. Looked him calmly — as calmly as I could — in the eye. He looked quizzically back. Lifted his fingers a little from my cheek. I didn't react. Lifted them a little more. Finally took his hand away.

I took a deep breath. Shuddered a little. "Tell me about these others," I said quietly.

"No one leaves," the man said. Like it was a mantra. "They control the island."

"Go on," I prompted when he stopped.

He seemed confused by this. He continued, but it was more like he was rambling to himself, than that he was explaining anything to me. "They made me join, but they leave me alone mostly. He worships Her. We all worship Her, but He more than anyone else."

"Who is Her?" I asked ungrammatically.

The man merely turned. He saw the shrine amid the candles and started, guiltily, as if he had forgotten it was there. He promptly dropped to his knees, head bowed in supplication. "We serve!" he muttered in prayer. "No one leaves! Your will be done!"

I had the camera out already. I took a quick pan then pushed in on the shrine. An androgynous figure, barely decipherable as even human, was picked out crudely in white paint on the raw rock surface. Rays emanated from the figure like a child's drawing of a light bulb.

"The supplicant kneels before his goddess," I narrated softly. "Here in this chamber, against a backdrop of driftwood and flotsam, a true piety is observed." I knelt by him, putting him in focus. "Tell us about her," I urged.

The man blinked, looking into the camera. "She is the Sun Queen," he explained to the camera.

"And the others?" I asked, in my best interview manner.

"They serve her with blood," he said. "With sacrifice. She brings the storms. She brings the salvage, to them. She brings the victims, to them. I have saved this girl, from them."

He meant me. Creepy much?

"She will stay, and we will worship her together."

Okay, _that_ was creepy. I was on my feet already. I could see his whole sad little fantasy playing out before my eyes. The grateful rescued, the happily ever after in this sea cave full of sodden salvage.

"Um…I'm going now," I told him.

"You must stay!" he came to his feet in one lithe motion. "Kill you, they will!"

"Let them, I won't," I retorted. "Talking like Yoda, we are." And then I started running. I got past him. Smashed my way through hanging wooden floats, up a narrow passage with sea water wetting the floor. I could hear his bare feet slapping against the wet stone after me.

There! Fresh air was coming from a narrow opening. Hands and knees narrow. But it wasn't like the experience could really get more claustrophobic than it was already. So in I went.

He grabbed my heel. "Get off of me, you fucker!" I kicked back at him, wrenched my foot free.

And I was in daylight. On a narrow gravel beach under looming cliffs with the not-particularly placid sea to my front. A shore littered with flotsam. Broken crates. A wrecked lifeboat. A rusted shipping container. A crashed sea plane. The remains of a three-masted sailing ship. A Typhoon-class submarine….okay maybe I was making that last up.

The beach was a slice of Sargasso, a graveyard of ships. This was _not_ Japan. This was fucking Mysterious Island of the Bermuda Triangle of the Sea of Japan. This was _Lost_ without the cute guys.

Insert quote about Toto and Kansas here.

"Well, shit," I said.


	3. I've Seen Fire and I've Seen Rain

The next bit was, I have to admit, a bit of a blur. The rising tide drove me off the beach; the waves were rising in sullen anger, throwing themselves across the wrecks and wreckage and sending sprays of water into the chilly wind that was blowing off the sea. That and I didn't want to stick around to see if Grabby Man or these "Others" were going to appear.

I crawled inland up the kind of slopes you need to drag yourself along with your hands, up gullies often wet with runoff, slipping and sliding in the mud and banging into the rocks as I went. I was in a daze, still in shock from the wreck.

I stumbled along the narrow path I'd found myself on, a path between sheer cliff on one side and sheer drop-off on the other. The sun was fading fast. Drizzle came from the dark, clouded sky, filtering down through the leaves. I shivered. Damned good thing I had a jacket, at least. Hate to think what this would have been like in a shirt.

Ducked my head into a small niche under an overhang, where at least I was out of the rain. Fell to my knees. Adrenaline strength was gone. I collapsed over on one shoulder, forced my dead arms to wrap around my cold legs. Like a ragdoll, like a puppet with the strings cut. _There's no strings on me_. The shivering wracked me.

A sound brought the world back into focus. Brought the world back suddenly and sharply. It was a sound that dragged you back from the modern world and the safety of cities through a million years of harsh instinct. It was the sound of wolves on the hunt.

My limbs were still numb but suddenly I could feel the cold again. Cold damp air washed the cobwebs from my head leaving just that chilly, practical animal intelligence. I shivered. Violently. _I was going to die here_. _My life was over — unless I did something about it right now_.

I fumbled around in the near-darkness. The floor was smoothed dirt, a sure sign others had sheltered here before. My touch felt rocks. Rock in the homey familiar shape from those day camping trips. A fire pit. There was even wood. If only it wasn't too damp…

The shivers were shaking my whole body but I clamped down on them in determination. That animal brain wasn't willing to die, not just yet. The overwhelming instinct was to curl up nose-to-tail and sleep, trusting in the coat of fur we'd unfortunately lost millions of years back. But I knew better. Sleep was death. Survival meant that old and dangerous friend. Fire.

My scrabbling hand found a battered matchbox, probably salvaged from one of the many wrecks. A single match, the head soft and crumbly from age and damp.

So I pulled out my Ronson. Held it to the wood which smoked and spat before, reluctantly, catching. Light climbed out, caught and spread, the radiated warmth almost painful on my numb hands.

 _All the adults said smoking would kill me. Bet they'd never believe it would save my life,_ I thought wryly. I'd given it up long ago, but the friends that hadn't would never remember to bring their own light. After a while, it was just a thing, like always having twenty-three cents in change in my left pocket.

I had a fire now. I would live. I slumped in a sitting position before the fire, arms wrapped around my knees and head down. It was all sinking in. For the first time since the wreck, I could actually take a mental step back and take in my situation and it sucked.

Shipwrecked. Alone. I couldn't believe everyone else was gone. I couldn't. They must have made it ashore as well. They would be out here somewhere. Looking for me. Heaven knows I hadn't made the impression of a girl who knew how to take care of herself! No, they'd be out there trying to find me. And get us all back to the mainland.

But they could be anywhere. I had no idea how far Grabby Man had taken me, or how far those winding sea caves of his ran. They could be miles away from me.

No matter. I found myself drifting into recollection. Angus Grim, the pugnacious little Scott who ran the boat. He was a pint-sized version of the grizzled sea captain, with that thousand-nautical-mile stare of someone who has seen everything the sea has to offer, and the brawling spirit of two or three men his size. I remembered a National Geographic documentary on the _Bounty_. The real Captain Bligh was so good a sailor he navigated an open boat across four thousand miles of ocean after the mutiny. Yeah; Angus had that same look.

Alex and Reyes. What a strange team we'd ended up with. And apparently it was Alex's fault, although the others weren't forthcoming with the details. He was a geek, basically. Spooky good with computers, but no focus. He belonged in college, where the only harm he could do was to his own studies.

Reyes was an ex-cop. Not ex enough, if you asked me. I had to admit I had certain…issues…with authority figures, and she couldn't help but use that talking-to-kindergartners voice. She was always right, and you either said, "Yes, Ma'am," or you were part of the problem. She had a temper, too.

And Jonah. Here I smiled in memory. Big islander dude. Total bear, if you asked me. Soft-spoken, with a lovely lilting accent, a big friendly face, muscles to die and go to heaven on. I indulged myself in the fantasy of him walking back from the depths of the island on his tree-trunk legs, carrying me snug and safe over one broad shoulder, back to a white-sand beach where the others all waited around a big bonfire dining on fish and toasting each other with salvaged spirits while the rescue ship approached.

Yeah, that's all I needed to do now. Keep warm, try to get dry, and wait for my friends to rescue me.

It wouldn't be long.


	4. Oh, Deer

Yeah, great plan.

I awoke with actual stomach pangs. Not the "skipped a meal because you were running late for classes," or the "trying to skip a meal because you'd gotten it into your head you were gaining weight," but actual sharp pains.

Who would think that heavy exertion in cold weather would give you an appetite? I remembered an episode on Amundsen on National Geographic's documentary series _Explorers_. Those antarctic explorers brought pemmican with them. Pemmican, for those who haven't had the honor of its acquaintance, was dry powdered meat mixed with fat and maybe a little fruit and pressed into a brick. Serve in balmy weather at a nice restaurant it wouldn't matter what you called it or how much you charged per serving, no-one could get it down. But get up on the glaciers and the body started craving that concentrated diet of fat and protein.

I was a yoghurt and muesli girl myself, although I confess to a real sweet tooth for Buff Wachos from the Lobos Truck. I missed LA. That was the problem in being born to parents from two different worlds who had met in a third; no place was home for long. The last place I'd felt like I was actually living in was ULA. I remembered so well the bustle of classes, the protest rallies on campus, all the exciting projects the other students in the Film Department were getting up to…my roommate and bestie for a couple of years, a quiet studious chick with a cute British accent and the most amazing pair of…

 _Food. Now_. That animal brain was calling out again. "Call of the Wild, will you accept the charges?" I said aloud. "Samantha Nishimura, this is your stomach calling. Seriously, girl, you need to start paying me more attention." I hadn't had blood sugar this low since that day I overslept on Midterms.

I staggered up and washed my face in a trickle of water that was coming down off the overhanging rock. Rescue is what I wanted. All I had to do is sit tight and rescue would arrive. But it wouldn't do me any good if I'd starved to death in the meanwhile.

So I walked.

A short bit of twisty path, through a little glade that had nift but loud little birdies in it, and I had discovered myself a remote sylvan paradise. Green, very green. A merry creek winding its way through. Birds and butterflies and just as I walked in I was face to face with the most darling deer. Rich red-brown coat, white tail, cute little face with the most amazing pair of deep brown eyes, just like my old roommate.

 _You're a little far from home_ , I told it. _I've seen the Nara deer. You are a North American White-tailed Deer. How did you get out here?_ It stared back at me, unsure what to make of me. Finally coming to a decision it wheeled off imperiously, hooves clattering against the rocky bed of the little creek.

I padded more slowly, trying not to rustle through the clumps of plant growth. A little brown bit of fluff flopped along, meandering across the sun-dabbled grass.

 _G'aw. What a cute widdle bunny. Aren't you the cutest little iddle-bummy-bunny!_

My stomach growled, loud enough to startle the bunny. It sat up to look around. _G'aw!_ Then loped off, making surprisingly brisk progress.

 _Oh. Berries._ I grabbed a mouthful. _Mmm_. Right. _Oh, look — wild lettuce. And there's some mushrooms…um, better not!_ Now that I had some of my blood sugar back, I could start thinking straight again. Now what I _really_ needed is to find a coffee tree.

A slight downslope into what looked like a box canyon. Maybe it opened up further along. _And oh no. What is that hanging from that tree?_

There was a body hanging from a tree. Head-down. I didn't want to — I couldn't look at it. So I pulled out the camera. "Khaki slacks, polo shirt," I commented, studying the image in the viewfinder. It was that too-casual look of plain-clothes uniform, like deck attendants or private security. He had a crude bow slung over his shoulder, a bow that looked hand-made. "I can't use that," I muttered. What would I want with a bow?

So. Unless this was some obscure funerary practice I didn't know about, there was definitely Something Rotten in the state of little-island-somewhere-near-Japan. People who went in for dead bodies as landscaping material didn't in my opinion make good neighbors.

And, yeah, that's when I started studying some of the grassy knolls a little closer than I had when my blood sugar was down around toe level and what few brain cells were still active had nothing but cute widdle bunny on their tiny minds. The lump closest to me was actually a concrete pillbox. _Here? In the middle of no-where?_ Even more bizarrely, the next lump along appeared to be the crashed wreck of a light truck. How had they even gotten it up here?

I grunted and scrabbled most unladylike but got into the back of the truck. The thing looked Army, and I knew Army rations would last forever. According to some people, even after ingestion. Rations I didn't find, but there was something interesting.

"An old notebook," I narrated my find to the bunnies and deer. "Diary, actually. Written in Japanese." I could read the stuff — Japanese on my father's side, thank you — but I wasn't even up to the 2,500 kanji considered necessary to read the morning paper. Honestly, I slid by on the furigana in many modern texts. Our diary writer hadn't needed such crutches so it was tough going for me.

"This is old," I said after a bit. "World War II. He was a soldier in the Imperial Army. His unit was trapped here." I read that last entry again, a little more sure of my translation this time; "'…All these wrecks, the ruins... this entire island is a graveyard. It's only a matter of time, the Oni will come for us.'"

I closed the book quietly. "I'm sorry, Yamazaki- _san_." Whatever he had seen or feared, it had happened long ago.

 _Wait_. That had been a splash. A particular kind of splash. I slithered out of the tipped-over vehicle and got down to the edge of the water. There was a surprisingly deep little pool below the short waterfall. _Fish? I didn't think this creek was big enough for that._ My stomach had beat me to the point. The berries had taken the edge off, but I was feeling a dangerous fragility. The efforts of the last twelve hours had cost me too deeply; I needed real food, and soon, or I wasn't going to make survive this. Pemmican, you know.

Yeah, I knew the stock narrative. I was supposed to set snares, catch game, skin and eat. Work my way up to whole deer on the assumption that deer hide and a fish-bone needle in the hands of a girl who consistently flunked Home Ec could outdo the garmenting skills of Italy. No, I'd stick with my current jacket and boots.

My stomach clenched in a no-nonsense way. It was telling me this was literally life and death. Well, I was no Buddhist. If I knew the first thing about how to dress game iddle widdle bunny would have an iddle widdle lifespan, but I didn't. I'm pretty sure "dressing" didn't mean balancing a pancake on its fluffy head.

But I _could_ gut a fish. Unlike Whitman, I'd paid attention. And if I needed to jog my memory, I had the video right here. I had no qualms about ending the life of one, not if it saved mine.

The only trouble was catching it in the first place…


	5. I Hear Music But There's No-One There

So here's what I _didn't_ try.

I'd seen _Okie Noodling_ so I knew all about handfishing in rural Oklahoma. But that was catfish. I'd given my fish a look — carefully so as not to spook it — and it wasn't a catfish. As far as I could tell it was wholly mackerel. A nearby bird agreed. "Thank you, Robin," I told it. Light-headed, right? The documentary had also mentioned trout tickling, but that seemed a little a little kinky. So no trying to catch this fish with my bare hands. Leave that trick for bear hands.

I had no rod, not even fishhooks. Weaving a net was a bit beyond my skill. Ah, but next down on the scale of simplicity was spear fishing. Because I didn't have any dynamite on me. _But where would I…Of course!_ The dead man with the bow. Bows use arrows. I rummaged in the underbrush. Sure enough. They had fire-hardened wooden tips, some kind of fletching…basically, they were arrows. Short for a spear but needs must.

So I took one in hand and knelt at the bank of the pool and waited like a Hemingway character for the fish to come to me.

And it all went to pieces very, very fast.

I saw the fish. Just as my shadow fell on it. Fish spooked. I threw. I'd misjudged the position of the fish — due to refraction of the water, I realized days later — but unluckily for the fish that was the same way it had dodged. I also threw with such vigor I, um, threw myself in the water with it.

So there I was rolling about in hip-deep water with a bloodied, hyper-active fish, a bunch of rocks, and at least one arrow. I managed to snag the arrow at one point and tried to pin the damned thing to the bottom of the pond, but all that did was free it from the arrow. "Come back here, you water-pissing freak!" I yelled, spouting water of my own. Snagged it by the tail. It wriggled hard, almost got away again. "Fuck OFF!" I told it and picking it up out of the water by the tail, slammed it against the rocks lining the edge of the pool. It wriggled some more. "Goddamnit, die already!" I dashed its head against the rocks again, and then again.

I must have looked a sight when I crawled from the water, chest heaving from the exertion. Soaked to the skin (again!) hair wild, eyes glaring, fish blood all over my hands. They'd use my image for the next remake of _The Ring_.

 _I am become Shiva, destroyer of fish!_ I felt like, I dunno, Medea or something, exultant from the kill. Err, maybe that wasn't the best image either.

I took my fish, and I went back to the campsite. Gutting was messier and took longer than I expected, and I did a really lousy job of getting all the bones, but it didn't matter _one little bit_. I had _fish_. I crammed it down and licked my fingers in an orgy of carnivorous happiness. The animal mind sat back on its haunches and howled approval. We were going to live.

Hell, I could get used to this. Next task; learn how to brew beer!

Music interrupted my Robison Crusoe dreams.

 _Sounds sorta Japanese…I think that's Okinawan. Can't be Amuro Namie; she's not an alto. Sounds traditional, anyhow._

Yeah, but where was it _coming_ from?

Seemed to be coming from back in the glade. Maybe the bunnies had brought a boom box. The teddy bears were having a late-night picnic. I didn't want to go in the woods today — err, tonight — but whoever it was, at least they liked classical music.

Umm, on second thought — images of Hannibal Lector springing to mind — that's not such a good character recommendation.

But, hey. I had fish, I had a campfire, I had music…what this night needed next was a good ghost story. So I pulled out Corporal Yamazaki's diary and turned to page one.

And…yeah. They'd come to the island in the clouds. A conveniently placed little island right in the way of what was already looking like an Allied spearhead aiming for Japan.

I remember the heated conversation that day in the _Endurance's_ small galley. Funds were running low, and Whitman was running out of ideas. "We need to continue expanding the search pattern," Whitman was asserting. "Really: what do they teach these days? We must proceed logically or there's no point in it."

"Muster Whitman, ye can'nae 'expand' a' more — we're six hours 'tween turns a'ready!" Or something like that. Did I mention I don't speak Glaswegian?

"Square of the distance," Alex, the kid, chimed in explanation unasked. "You need to move the pattern, not make it bigger. Besides, next lap would put us right in Storm City. Seriously, would you look at these satellite images I grabbed?"

"It's _Doctor_ Whitman." Trust the prick to single that out as the most important part of what they'd said.

"Alex…" Reyes' voice had that warning tone. I remember bristling at it, even without it being directed at me. "Did you just hack a commercial weather sat?"

"Um…" Alex didn't finish — but he flashed a cocky grin. "Damndest thing," he couldn't leave it alone, though. "I just did a little looking around. It's one of those funny pockets where trade wind crosses one of the deep transoceanic currents or something. There's a pocket of clouds that _never_ goes away."

"Clouds." I didn't even realize I was speaking aloud. "Like the poem said, 'The Island Covered in Clouds.'"

Whitman swung on me. "The Storm Queen. We thought it was just another one of Himiko's titles."

"Oh, no," I said, as I started to get his drift. "I don't think we should go that way." For some reason the idea filled me with dread.

"You don't think," Whitman mimicked. "You don't think! I have a full professorship, two degrees, one in East Asian history, and thirty years experience in doing this. I _think_ that makes me the lead archaeologist."

"I dinnae like the looks of that chop," Grim said doubtfully. "but if it's wet, I can sail you on it."

"Look, my family is putting up the money. They want Yamatai, but they'll settle for footage. So why don't we head _west_ and pull in around a nice beach where we can cavort in the sun?"

"Yamatai is under those clouds," Whitman said. "I'm sure of it. How else could it have escaped attention until now?" He unbent a little then, smiled with false graciousness. "Go ahead and contact your family if you feel you need to, Samantha. I see no reason not to keep them fully informed."

The prick was _that_ sure about how they'd respond. And the shitty thing was…he turned out to be right. And that was one tense, unhappy conversation. One of many I'd had with family over the years, to be sure, but this time it wasn't with Dear Old Dad and Mom trying to control their wild child. This was with a bunch of old men in black suits to whom even speaking English was dangerously modern. Never you mind actually listening to a mere _girl_.

And I remembered, now. Even though we continued to eat and chat and joke around as the _Endurance_ moved out on its new heading, there was something new in the air. Not just optimism. But I don't think I was the only one who felt a shadow falling across my grave.

Just as Corporal Yamazaki had, sixty years ago. Thing is, if I was reading his diary correctly — he'd been right.


End file.
